Eastern Columbia Lofts: what it means to own a piece of an Art Deco landmark

There are buildings you buy into, and there are buildings you become a custodian of. Eastern Columbia Lofts at 849 S Broadway is the second kind. It is a 13-storey Art Deco tower in Downtown LA, converted to 147 residences in 2006, and it is probably the most photographed piece of architecture in the city. Owning there is not quite like owning anywhere else, and the reasons are worth spelling out before you fall for the turquoise.

Nine months, and a clock tower that broke the height limit

The building opened on September 12, 1930, after nine months of construction, designed by Claud Beelman for the Eastern and Columbia stores — furniture and homeware in one, apparel in the other, both run by Adolph Sieroty. It was built at a cost of $1.25 million and was one of the largest buildings put up downtown until after the Second World War.

Los Angeles enforced a 150-foot height limit at the time. The decorative clock tower was granted an exemption, which is why the four-sided clock reading EASTERN in neon sits 264 feet up while the occupied floors stop well below it. The steel-reinforced concrete frame is clad in glossy turquoise terra cotta with deep blue and gold trim; the sidewalks on the Broadway and Ninth Street sides are multi-coloured terrazzo laid in zigzags and chevrons; the main entrance opens into a recessed two-storey vestibule with a blue and gold terra cotta sunburst.

The department stores closed downtown in 1957 and the building was refitted as apparel-industry offices, which is roughly what it stayed for the next four decades. The clock stopped. It was restarted on June 23, 2005, at a ceremony marking the building’s 75th anniversary, while the condominium conversion was underway.

The conversion, and what it preserved

KOR Group and Killefer Flammang Architects finished the two-year renovation in 2006, producing the 147 live/work condominiums that exist today, with interiors by Kelly Wearstler. The project won a Los Angeles Conservancy Preservation Award in 2008.

Designation came earlier and from two directions. The National Park Service listed the building in 1979 as a contributing structure in the Broadway Theater and Commercial Historic District. The city named it Historic-Cultural Monument No. 294 in 1985 — the finding was that it had become a visual landmark representative of the vitality of the city’s retail and commercial core.

A landmark designation is not decoration. It sets the standard the building has to be repaired to, and the association pays for that standard.

What keeping a landmark actually costs

This is the part most building profiles skip, and it is the part that matters if you are writing an offer. By 2016 the terra cotta cladding was chalking, discolouring and spalling. Water was getting in, and it was reaching the structure, the cladding anchorage and the interiors of owners' units.

The homeowners association brought in Wiss, Janney, Elstner Associates to assess it. The restoration began in 2023 and involved replacing 900 individual terra cotta units and restoring more than 5,000, matching the building’s signature turquoise, replacing mortar joints and rebuilding the exterior wall as a working water barrier — all of it carried out to the Secretary of the Interior’s Standards. The Conservancy gave the project a second Preservation Award in 2025.

That is an enormous piece of work for a 147-residence association to carry, and it is the single most useful thing to ask about here: how it was funded, what it did to reserves, and what the current reserve study says is next. Our guide to reading an HOA budget covers the documents to request.

The Mills Act contract is the other half of the story

When the building was converted, the developer entered into a Mills Act contract, and the Conservancy states it remains in effect today. The Mills Act gives owners of qualified historic property a reduced assessment in exchange for maintaining and rehabilitating it, through a revolving ten-year contract with the city. Two features matter to a buyer: the tax benefit is meant to be spent on the building, and the contract transfers with the property when it sells.

The programme itself is in flux. Los Angeles began a review of it in 2020 and has not accepted new contracts since. Draft policy and ordinance amendments went out in March 2025; the Conservancy opposes parts of them, including contract non-renewal and the removal of the Downtown and Hollywood valuation exemption areas. Most of the proposed changes are on hold because of the city’s budget deficit, but on December 20, 2025 the City Council approved an annual fee structure that took effect on February 23, 2026, currently collected only on contracts dated after 2014.

None of that is a reason not to buy here. It is a reason to ask, in writing, what the contract’s terms are, when it renews, and how the reduced assessment shows up on the tax bill for the specific residence you are considering — rather than assuming the seller’s number carries over unchanged.

Where it sits on Broadway

Eastern Columbia is not an isolated conversion. Orpheum Lofts at 842–846 S Broadway is a 1927 building converted in 2003 into 37 residences across 12 storeys, directly opposite. 939 Broadway Lofts, built in 1924 and converted in 2019, holds 151 residences over 11 storeys a block south. The block reads as a single Deco-era streetscape because a run of buildings on it were all brought back rather than replaced.

If the appeal of a historic conversion is the point for you, our loft condominiums collection and the iconic buildings list are the places to start, and the case for loft living downtown covers what changes day to day. When you are ready to look at a specific residence at Eastern Columbia, a Condos of LA advisor can pull the HOA documents, the reserve position after the restoration, and the Mills Act paperwork before you commit to anything.